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Mom never made her ninety-day cheese factory deadline, but the owner let her rent it for as long as she needed. We stayed an additional two months as she looked for a suitable job and a house that never materialized. In the wake of our failed resettling, Mom packed us up and we left the Oneida Indian reservation once again, returning to Brigham City, in September 1962. Mom went back to work at the Intermountain Indian School as a food-service worker. I joined the sixth-grade class at Mountain View Elementary.
That year, I read Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey. I saw my first science documentary about the physiology of blood, Hemo the Magnificent, which featured short video clips of the human heart in motion and red blood cells flowing in single file through microscopic capillaries. The narrator, Dr. Research, used graphics and cartoons to illustrate the structure and function of the blood, heart, and circulatory system. The film lasted about an hour. I sat on the edge of my chair, leaning forward and listening to every word. As the credits rolled at the end of the film, I felt compelled to become a scientist just like Dr. Research. And what I felt wasn’t just an idea about an interesting job or a fleeting fancy about the future; it felt more like an anointing with the holy oil of science, maybe like the traditional blessing I had received while at Oneida. After seeing the documentary I wanted to run off to college immediately and study physiology and circulation and healing. Science held the promise of something great and wonderful.
On Saturdays I would walk the short mile to the public library, where the librarian, who always smiled warmly when I told her I was going to be a doctor, put books aside for me about the history of science. My favorite one told the story of William Harvey and his research on the human heart and circulatory system. I read it three or four times, all but memorizing the artist’s renderings of Harvey’s drawings. I also read about Leeuwenhoek and his invention of the microscope, about Galileo and the telescope, and about Fleming’s 1928 discovery of penicillin. I learned how physicians used folk medicine, herbs, bleeding, and surgery to cure their patients. Some explored how the human body worked, and that was my greatest fascination. I needed to know how the science of medicine worked, how it healed the body.
I would pull Gray’s Anatomy off the library shelf and seclude myself in a quiet corner to absorb as many of the pages as I could in a Saturday morning or afternoon. I don’t know that I read the book as much as just looked at the fascinating drawings—the interstices and the shapes, the intricate weave of anatomy and the ordered structure of the human body. I traced the blood vessels and organs with my fingertips and marveled at the beautiful four-color overlays. I saturated my mind with the mystique of the body. Anatomy and physiology mattered to me because they defined the rules of injury and healing; they controlled how skin made scars and bones grew back together. The more I read, the more I had to read and the more I wanted to comprehend it all.
For my twelfth birthday, Mom bought me a model of the human body called the Visible Man. It had a clear plastic shell that mimicked human skin. All the internal organs were there: brain, heart, lungs, liver, intestines, and a semblance of reproductive organs. I painted each one with its corresponding color in the included study guide, taking extra time to add the tiny intricate vessels with a toothpick dipped in red or blue model paint. The chest and abdominal cavity opened by gently flexing the tabs of the overlying plastic chest and abdominal wall. The lungs folded on a bivalve hinge, exposing the bronchial tree. I fancied myself an anatomist. I did simulated dissections almost every day and performed mock surgery on the Visible Man. I took him apart and put him back together. Apart—together; carefully—precisely. And each time I dissected the model, I learned more about the human body, became more of a scientist, more of a doctor.
That Christmas I asked for a microscope. Mom cautioned me that she couldn’t afford it and that maybe next year she would have more money. “Don’t be disappointed,” she said with a frown. On Christmas morning, I spotted a large box under the tree. She made me open it last. When I unwrapped it, I knew immediately what it was. I was ecstatic; Mom had put the microscope on layaway at a department store in Ogden and paid for it over the prior six months.
I mounted my own specimens of cells—studied them for hours. I gathered leaves and butterfly wings and samples of vegetable pigments. I would prick my fingertip with one of my mother’s sewing needles, dab the blood on a slide, add a cover slip, and observe. Often the heat from the stage lamp caused the red cells to dry and lose their color before I got enough time to study them in detail. I learned to work fast and change my techniques to protect the kinds of samples I was studying. My time was never dull or wasted. At school, my science teacher took an interest in what I was doing at home and gave me premounted slides of different kinds of tissues from plants and animals. I wrote reports about my findings. He said I was a natural scientist and should plan on going to college.
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The summer before I started the seventh grade, Mom decided to build a twelve-foot addition on the back of the house. She also added an enclosed stairway for the dugout basement, a slanted roof, and plumbing for our own indoor toilet. She had saved enough money for most of the project and arranged with a friend of a friend to do the construction. She paid him in monthly installments, plus interest, over a year. I helped with odd jobs and painting without pay. A supervisor from Fife’s Gravel Pit agreed to give Mom a load of leftover cement for a poured foundation. He said they would have just washed it out at a dumpsite anyway, and since it was paid for, she might as well have it. She thanked him with a jar of homemade pickles.
Beyond all the uncertainties of growing up in those early houses, each one fixed in the inertia of disrepair, I had a feeling a house could define me, at least partially. The physical nature of a house was one thing; the emotional nature of living in that house was a quite different thing. Where you lived mattered. The houses we lived in were small, old, decrepit, and peculiar. They held a history of the impoverished people who lived in them, and to anybody listening, especially to me, those houses shouted that we lived in poverty, both on and off the reservation. As I grew older, I became aware of the dark physics of that poverty. Starting in the sixth grade, and especially as I entered junior high and high school, I felt increasingly embarrassed and even ashamed that we lived as we did. I rarely brought school friends home to play or study; instead I went to their houses, to their yards and their living rooms. I ate their moms’ snacks, listened to their stories, and wanted to insert myself into their family narratives. At the end of each day, though, I returned to our Fifth South home, because it was what my mother could provide, and because it was where I belonged.
Against that backdrop of constant struggle, I was confronted with watching my mother’s stubborn doggedness at providing a home for her children. I knew her life was not easy. I could see it in her worn shoes and in her threadbare dresses, in the way she paid her bills at the end of the month, often paying one bill instead of another, always making sure her checking account had just enough money to cover the checks she had written. In the years spanning 1954 to 1969, the wages from her food-service job ranged from seventy-five cents to less than two dollars per hour. I saw her pay stubs that she kept in shoeboxes. Her work included scrubbing floors and loading and unloading racks of dirty dishes into an industrial dishwasher. She wore long rubber gloves to protect her hands from the heat and detergents. On weekends she often worked as a cleaning lady in private homes.
When she was having a particularly hard time keeping up with finances, she told me she just wanted to give up and die; then she would go to her room and lie on her bed. Occasionally I heard her cry. I never knew what to do, so I took the dog for a long walk and gathered wild asparagus or elderberries. When I returned, I found her at her sewing machine making aprons or kitchen towels out of flour sacks, or in the kitchen canning fruit and vegetables for winter. As she looked up to see what I brought home, she told me how beautiful it looked and how I had a knack for discovering
things, and then she would make an elderberry pie or steam the asparagus for dinner.
As a young man, I never fully understood the hardship my mother endured as a single parent. After I left home, I often reflected on the kind of life she lived. She endured the squelch of poverty and the harsh burden of isolation. Her Indian school job perpetuated its own kind of dependency and subsistence living. Much like an Indian reservation, it constantly abraded the bodies and minds of people who had no choice but to remain and endure. And when that struggle wore Mom to the edge of despair, she would sometimes lash out at anything that pushed her just one more inch. Once, Jimmy hounded her for a pair of new Levi’s jeans for the start of school. “Everybody in school has new jeans,” he kept insisting. Mom told him she simply didn’t have the money. Jimmy talked back and said something about her stinking Indian school job. Mom spun around and pinned him to the wall with her thumb.
“Don’t you ever talk back to me if you know what’s good for you!” she shouted in Oneida and English. “You’re not everybody. I’m not everybody. I don’t have the money. If you want new jeans, then get your own money and buy them yourself.”
I listened from the edge of the sofa. Jimmy was shaking. It felt like all the oxygen in the house had been replaced by a poisonous gas that would kill us if we breathed too deeply. I could see Jimmy swallow hard. He was taller and stronger than Mom, yet she had reduced him to someone small and weak.
Mom gave us both the lecture about “money not growing on trees” and the one that reminded us that we were “good for nothing,” and another one about how “we never helped around the house.” She yelled that we didn’t know what it was like to work until we were “bone-tired” and then have to crawl home from work and cook and clean and hold a family together. She finally let Jimmy go and told us go clean our rooms, and then she turned toward the front door. “I’m going to the store. Maybe I’ll just keep on walking,” she said, her words high pitched and tremulous.
Jimmy and I were both sweating and trembling. There was an overbearing stillness in the house and I could hear my heartbeat. I struggled with Mom’s words, “good for nothing,” and I knew they weren’t true, that she had lost herself in anger, but I also knew that it wasn’t the first time they had been said and that they carried at least some fragment of truth—some part of us was good for nothing. And the hearing of those words struck hard, and there was pain and emptiness and sadness. I felt regret that I had not worked harder around the house or spent more time being less demanding, and that I was not more capable of taking care of myself. I realized then how precariously we lived and how necessary it was to be independent, not relying on anyone or anything.
Mom always harped on me to stay in school and get a good education. “Don’t be like me. I’m nothing but a scrub lady,” she would say. Her words cut like a jagged blade ripped across my skin. I felt both sadness and anger. Hearing those words made me want to run as far away as I could, not from her, but from our poverty and from our shame. I hated those words, in part because they were true, in part because they belied the truth of who my mother really was, of who I was. Yes, we were poor and brown and burdened. Yes, we wrestled with cultural and social perceptions that made us question the heart of who we were. But “dammit the hell anyway,” as my mother used to say, we were not nothing! We carried the history of those Oneida warriors who enlisted in times of war and died in foreign lands. Our stories preserved the elders who survived the Depression by eating corn husk soup and wild berries and taught survival skills to their children. We represented traditional healers who rendered prayers and blessings, all while bearing the collective weight of government policies that sought to remove and relocate Indian tribes against their will. Most important, we were the family who forged a trail of survival all the way from Oneida to Utah, where we carved a life from a different land and a different culture.
I didn’t want to be poor like my mother, to live in the kinds of houses we lived in, to scrape for every nickel we had, and to always be in want for something better. I wanted to push as far beyond her poverty as I could to accomplish the life I envisioned for myself. So I did just that. Over three decades of pushing boundaries, I eventually became the doctor of my boyhood dreams, and in the struggle to do so, I discovered a paradox: while striving to become less like Mother, I actually became more like her. I learned to redefine the boundaries that scripted my life, to become good for something, to push myself hard, right up close to the edges. And when I was finally there, finally at the clear edge of a boundary where both directions were visible, I would place one foot in front of the other and step across.
Throughout high school my mother lectured me on the need to “get ahead.” “You’ve got to get an education,” she would say. Her stern lectures bordered on a scolding. She emphasized learning a trade or joining the Army to gain some kind of special skill. Those two choices formed the range of her experience and expectations. Her mind-set, which I regarded as based on the experiences of other Indian families who had left reservations, stressed a basic vocational approach to survival: learn a trade and enter the workforce. Becoming a successful Indian in a non-Indian world required families and students to develop a very different belief about their educational abilities, their future careers, and what it meant to live in mainstream America. Changing and overcoming a reservation paradigm was not easy.
With so many factors pushing the odds against higher education, it was difficult to understand how I managed to go to college, but I did manage. I was accepted at the University of Utah and enrolled in the summer quarter of 1969. The morning I left, my mother pressed an envelope into my hands. It held three hundred dollars—most of her bank savings. It helped pay for two quarters of college.
During orientation week, I checked “premed” on the intake forms. The checkmark determined my academic advisor, a chemistry professor who held a group advising session with twelve to fifteen premed students during the first week of class. I remember his first words: “Premed is a fantasy.” He advised us to pick a major like chemistry or biology or engineering and gear ourselves toward a career in one of those fields. He warned that most of us would never see the inside of a medical school.
I chose biology as a default major because chemistry involved too much math and I had no interest in engineering. The biology department assigned yet another academic advisor, a botanist who did research in plant physiology. Rather than the frontal assault of the chemistry professor, the new advisor seemed more approachable and rather informal as he smoked his pipe while asking a few general questions: name, science courses taken in high school, future plans, and the like. He asked about my ethnic background. American Indian, I told him. Oneida tribe from Wisconsin. We chatted a bit about Native culture. He had a distant relative who had married an Indian woman and said I had quite a heritage. The advisor probed my math background and my grades in high school. He discovered my weakness in mathematics and asked me a point-blank question: “What would you like to do if you do not get into medical school?” Silence. I had never thought of that possibility. He waited for the answer. I finally gave it to him. “W-Well…,” I stammered. “Biology, I guess.”
He pointed at me with the stem of his pipe. “Biology is not a career, it’s an academic subject. Plant research is a career. Forestry is a career. Biology is not.”
After looking at my class schedule, he said it was overloaded with yearlong sequence courses and I needed to drop two courses from either the chemistry, math, or biology series. He said the intensity was too much for the first year and arranged for me to see the American Indian student advisor the following day.
I learned from that advisor, a Navajo who held a master’s degree in social work, that Native students did not go into the “hard sciences,” as he called them. “We do better in social work and education,” he said. Even though I had taken nearly every science class my high school offered, he felt I wasn’t prepared for college-level science. He told me there was a huge dropout ra
te in premed regardless of ethnic background and that I should rethink my major, or at least make a backup plan. He asked if I had taken the interest inventory and career aptitude tests in high school. I had. I told him my scores indicated I should become a plumber or an “other.” I took “other” to include becoming a doctor. He chuckled and said that he hadn’t tested well either, then he looked at my class schedule and agreed with the biology advisor. He took a red pen to my schedule and crossed off math and chemistry. After leaving his office, I went to the registrar’s office and dropped chemistry but kept the math and biology series.
The advisors were right. My freshman year quickly degenerated into a whirlwind of academic disasters and social distractions. I tried to manage two yearlong courses simultaneously but lacked the self-discipline to adhere to a rigorous study plan. The assigned math problems seemed a blur, as did the foreign accents of the graduate teaching assistants assigned to teach the problem sessions. The biology classes only reviewed what I had already learned in high school. The “hard sciences” became a drudge. I often loafed around and sloughed off on class assignments. There were parties to attend, ball games to see, and weekends to waste away.
Within a year I dropped my premed major just as my first advisor had predicted. And I felt the sting of confusion about who I was and what direction my future would take. If not medicine, then what? I bounced around for the better part of my sophomore year, changing my major from psychology to prelaw to music. Music lasted for three quarters, during which I studied theory and jazz composition. I had not mastered a musical instrument, so I had to take group piano lessons for two quarters. I learned to play every scale and, just to show off, I played one scale with my right hand and another with my left—four octaves, ascending and descending. It was my only musical talent. When it was clear that I didn’t have a future in music, I decided to get practical and major in business. I started in the business school in my junior year.
Crossings Page 3